For it to work you need dbus installed, and your MacBook should have the light sensor located in /sys/devices/platform/applesmc.768/light (should be available on all MacBookAir and MacBookPro versions which have a backlight on keyboard, as far as I know).

If you are running Ubuntu, you can install it by adding lightum-mba ppa to your system:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:poliva/lightum-mba
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install lightum

I just wanted to say thanks for this. I’m using it with Arch Linux on my MacBook Pro 8,2 and it works perfectly. I installed lightum from source and put the binary in my path, then added ‘lightum’ as a startup program in xfce4 – nothing to it. Now can someone please figure out how to adjust screen brightness on a Macbook Pro 8,2 in GNU/Linux?

Thank you!
Would it be possible to change the minimum brightness by pressing F2 or F6 so that lightum doesn’t dimm the light under this level?
For example when I want to look a video I put the brightness of maximum by pressing the F2. At the moment lightum automatically dimms the brightness and I can’t set a dynamical minimum brightness.

Currently you can dynamically change the maximum brightness value using the function keys if you add the option ‘ignoreuser=0′ in the config file. An option that would probably suit you more is switching to manual mode instead of auto mode while viewing the video, you can use the lightum-indicator applet to do this in a quick & comfortable way.

Hi pof,
thank you but when I use the function keys in ignoreuser=0 mode lightum doesn’t accept it and change the brightness again.
The indicator seems to be very nice but it doesn’t work here. I can’t change the accommondation with the applet. Maybe something with the right from lightum.conf?
Thanks!

Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.kde.Solid.PowerManagement was not provided by any .service files
Can’t manage screen backlight on this system
Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownMethod: Method “SetPercentage” with signature “u” on interface “org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.Power.Screen” doesn’t exist

Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.kde.Solid.PowerManagement was not provided by any .service files
Can’t manage screen backlight on this system
Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownMethod: Method “SetPercentage” with signature “u” on interface “org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.Power.Screen” doesn’t exist

Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.kde.Solid.PowerManagement was not provided by any .service files
Can’t manage screen backlight on this system
Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownMethod: Method “SetPercentage” with signature “u” on interface “org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.Power.Screen” doesn’t exist

Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.kde.Solid.PowerManagement was not provided by any .service files
Can’t manage screen backlight on this system
Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownMethod: Method “GetPercentage” with signature “” on interface “org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.Power.Screen” doesn’t exist

Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.kde.Solid.PowerManagement was not provided by any .service files
Can’t manage screen backlight on this system
Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownMethod: Method “SetPercentage” with signature “u” on interface “org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.Power.Screen” doesn’t exist

Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.kde.Solid.PowerManagement was not provided by any .service files
Can’t manage screen backlight on this system
Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownMethod: Method “SetPercentage” with signature “u” on interface “org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.Power.Screen” doesn’t exist

Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.kde.Solid.PowerManagement was not provided by any .service files
Can’t manage screen backlight on this system
Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownMethod: Method “SetPercentage” with signature “u” on interface “org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.Power.Screen” doesn’t exist

Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.kde.Solid.PowerManagement was not provided by any .service files
Can’t manage screen backlight on this system
Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownMethod: Method “GetPercentage” with signature “” on interface “org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.Power.Screen” doesn’t exist

Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.kde.Solid.PowerManagement was not provided by any .service files
Can’t manage screen backlight on this system
Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownMethod: Method “SetPercentage” with signature “u” on interface “org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.Power.Screen” doesn’t exist

Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.kde.Solid.PowerManagement was not provided by any .service files
Can’t manage screen backlight on this system
Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownMethod: Method “SetPercentage” with signature “u” on interface “org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.Power.Screen” doesn’t exist

Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.kde.Solid.PowerManagement was not provided by any .service files
Can’t manage screen backlight on this system
Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownMethod: Method “SetPercentage” with signature “u” on interface “org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.Power.Screen” doesn’t exist

Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.kde.Solid.PowerManagement was not provided by any .service files
Can’t manage screen backlight on this system
Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownMethod: Method “GetPercentage” with signature “” on interface “org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.Power.Screen” doesn’t exist

Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.kde.Solid.PowerManagement was not provided by any .service files
Can’t manage screen backlight on this system
Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownMethod: Method “SetPercentage” with signature “u” on interface “org.gnome.SettingsDaemon.Power.Screen” doesn’t exist

Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.kde.Solid.PowerManagement was not provided by any .service files
Can’t manage screen backlight on this system

Please, instead of adding large comments here, open a bug report on github, and we can follow with the troubleshooting there. Please include in the bug report the output of the following commands too (run as root):

Wow, thank you very much for this.
There is a small problem. I have installed fedora 17 on my macbook.
Can this great package be built also for that distribution?
How do you do that, first install gcc and then …?
Thank you very much for any answer….

Thank you very much. I have tried to install the program with ‘make && make install’ but got some errors. So may be i have not installed all the build dependencies you mentioned.
Seems that I have to find out first, what a build dependency is :)). I have not that much knowledge of programming with Gcc and even with Linux.
My error was:
[bernd@Nathan poliva-lightum-e7cc795]$ make && make install
cc `pkg-config –cflags dbus-1 –cflags dbus-glib-1` -Wall -Wextra -Wwrite-strings -O -g -c -o functions.o functions.c
Package dbus-1 was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `dbus-1.pc’
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package ‘dbus-1′ found
Package dbus-glib-1 was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `dbus-glib-1.pc’
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package ‘dbus-glib-1′ found
….

Thank you for your work.
Am I blind, or there is not parameter for auto mode for cmd line?
I am using Mint Maya with Cinnamon and there is some problem with indicator. Once I found it appeared on panel without icon. I set it on manual mode. After that applet disappeared and I could not force lightum to run in auto mode until conf file edited.
Still indicator not appearing.

I’ve just compiled the sources from git and it seems to work. I’m just slightly annoyed by the these messages:
[mafra@linux-ahr8:lightum]$ Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.gnome.SettingsDaemon was not provided by any .service files
Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.kde.Solid.PowerManagement was not provided by any .service files

sh: $’04′: command not found
sh: $’01′: command not found
sh: $’01′: command not found
sh: $’01′: command not found

and it goes one like this forever.

I assume it’s because I’m using WindowMaker, but I’m not sure where those messages are comming from.

is due to the broken function set_screen_xbacklight_value() in xbacklight.c which is called if the
neither Gnome nor KDE is detected. Since I’m using Window Maker, that’s the case for me.

That function even has a printf(“%s”, name) for a totally undefined ‘name’ and I suspect that my problems to suspend to RAM were related to running lightum because of that function. In any case, deleting its content fixes things for me.

Built from source on Arch Linux running Awesome WM. I notice there is some dependencies on gnome/kde services. Could you point me in the right direction to get this running without gnome/kde? I.e. is there some alternative settings and power management daemons that only depend on x11?